At the end of his first week as the new chief, Claude had settled in to the regularity of his nine-to-five job like he slipped on a comfortable pair of hush puppies. It was the last Friday of Lent. He was supposed to take Annie out for fish and chips. He tried not to drink during Lent, at least in front of Annie, except for a couple of “wild card” days he allowed himself. He thought he’d use one tonight. Enjoy a whiskey after a quiet first week. During the week, he quickly developed an affection for Dottie Marcuse, the dispatcher. She was so deferential, like she was always trying to shield him from stress. She’d been the dispatcher for ten years. Sweet as pie, always on time, loved her job as if there was absolutely nothing on earth she’s rather be doing. In only one week, Claude envied her contentment and the way she handled everything that came through her station. It was quite a luxury to have someone like that in the office. He could get used to this. He’d locked his desk and was reaching for the light switch when he heard the rapid-fire squawks from the dispatcher’s radio like a bunch of kids in a big family falling all over themselves, all vying for attention at once. Dottie on the mike with Dubois, the night sergeant, then with a patrolmen in one cruiser, then the other patrolman in the other cruiser, then rescue, fire, guys in pickups racing to the scene. Dottie swung her door open. “Chief!” she said, urgent and apologetic at once. ### He took his unmarked cruiser and called Annie on the way. Wanted to tell her he’d just be late for the fish and chips. Didn’t want to tell her there was a bad accident on Quicksand Pond Road. Called it just an accident. Said he’d be home soon. “I don’t want to look like I’m shirking my first week on the job.” “Playing politics already,” she kidded. “The hardest part of the job,” he sighed, keeping up his pretensions, trying to distract himself from his stomach clenching. Fish and chips lost their appeal. Breathe in deep through the nose, exhale slowly through the mouth. That’s what the lieutenant told him to do when he showed Claude his first fatal on the turnpike and Claude teetered between vomiting and fainting. His current shrink had him visualizing peaceful scenes. He thought of all the movies and sitcoms he’d seen with stressed out people hyperventilating into brown paper bags. How it got laughs. He remembered feeling like a failure when he was an altar boy and often had to leave the church in the middle of Mass and go outside and put his head between his knees because he was going to faint. When she found out, his mother scolded him for not eating breakfast. He sat himself up straight in the cruiser. He focused on thinking of nothing. “Can you just order takeout?” “Do you want to pick it up?” Annie asked. He wished he could say “sure, I won’t be long” tried to ram the accident call into the realm of the routine, knew he was bullshitting himself. “Would you pick it up? I’ll be there soon,” impatience infecting his voice now. “I’ll see you soon, honey.” Annie said before he hung up. Annie knew better. She began her wait. ### The word ‘bad’ jumped out from the Babel of voices on the cruiser radio like red boldface type. He reminded himself this was nothing new. Claude had responded to hundreds of turnpike crashes in his previous career as a state cop, but he quickly learned to avoid what would undo him. The smell of blood was one thing. He had a hypersensitive sense of smell, which gave him a pleasant delirium at high Mass when incense was used but dizzying nausea when he was exposed to blood. So he always let his partner or some other officer get closest to the victims. His well-earned reputation for superb paperwork while a state cop got him nicknamed “the secretary.” Claude also distinguished himself as a demon on the state police boxing team, an exhibition enterprise that raised funds for needy causes. Undefeated during the ten years he boxed. No one wanted to fight him. He was finally talked into hanging up his gloves to “give someone else a chance.” His reputation was for punches explosive as dynamite that might one day inflict serious damage, despite the headgear and the good intentions of the exhibition. In the state police, although he served in the western part of the state, far from Melanville, he realized one day he might see someone he knew involved in one of those crashes. By the grace of God, he believed, he skirted that. Because he was a state cop, the grim chore of telling parents their kid was killed in a crash or informing someone their elderly parents had perished on the turnpike was handled by the local cops where the dead had lived. But Quicksand Pond Road was not the turnpike. If there were bodies, he would know them or know of them. ### Quicksand Pond Road was one of many narrow, curving wooded roads in the south end of town. For every straightaway of a hundred yards, there was a dangerous curve. Kids loved to goose their engines on the straight-aways, sometimes intoxicated with nothing more than their invincibility. He passed Gauthier Road, where he and Annie used to go parking in high school, along with about a dozen other couples. The cops never bothered them. They deemed the kids safer necking than driving around at high speeds. Gauthier Road was the scene of the accident of their son Joshua’s conception. He pulled in behind the flashing lights of two cruisers. He left his hat on the seat and grabbed his flashlight. The other cruisers had their spotlights flooding light on a red Camaro, it’s front end in a crushing embrace of a three-foot thick sugar maple. He saw a dented sap bucket on the ground. Old man Sargent’s farm. Armand Benoit’s son Ray had a red Camaro. Sergeant Dubois, already not a favorite of Claude’s for the way he relished the sordid details of police work as if he were in one of those awful action/adventure movies Claude avoided, approached him, giddy with his proud assessment. “They must have been doing eighty. Went airborne.” Dubois said it as if he’d just watched a Dukes of Hazard episode. “We’ll let the reconstruction team from the state police determine that, sergeant,” Claude said abruptly. He looked at Dubois for more. “The boy’s decapitated,” Dubois said, savoring the gruesome fact. Claude turned and leaned over the shoulder of the road and puked while Dubois watched. As Claude wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, Dubois laid it on thicker: “We’re looking for the head.” ### Claude joined Dubois and the other officers sweeping their flashlights back and forth across the dried leaves, fallen, rotting trees and branches, and saplings around the car. He could smell the beer drooling out of the empties in the car. “Chief!” from one of the patrolmen told them the search was over. The searchers drifted toward the voice like a class of reluctant first penitents being herded into church for confession. Claude reached into his back pocket for his surgeon gloves without taking his eyes off the head of Ray Benoit. He forced his body into a zone of concentration he was not ordinarily capable of, like a man clinging to the edge of a cliff. He breathed hardly at all. “Get a bag,” he ordered to no one in particular. Nobody moved. “A fuckin’ body bag!” Claude barked. ### Armand Benoit hadn’t closed on Friday night in years. He got tired of getting the last couple of drunks into cabs or friend’s cars. Often, he was the last resort for a ride. He accepted the fact that people would get drunk in his tavern, but he took pride in the fact that no customer of his ever got into an accident after leaving the bar. He did what he could to prevent it. That and dumb luck or Divine Providence, take your pick, kept him out of trouble over the years. He secretly felt someone, probably his mother, who was a daily Mass attendee and Sunday benediction regular, issued the prayers necessary to save him from such horrible liability. He didn’t pay enough attention to the scanner to get more details than “red Camaro” which pricked his interest because that was Ray’s make and model. Ray became enamored with it because of Vic Vachon’s restored vintage red Camaro. So it could be Vic. He thought ‘if it’s Ray and his new Camaro, he’s grounded and he’ll learn his lesson when his insurance goes way up after the body work is done’. He’d grabbed his keys from the back counter. The phone rang. It was Claude asking him to stop by the station. Armand was happy to visit his friend in his new office, expected this might become a Friday ritual when they’d make weekend plans to go fishing or play cards with their wives on his big screened-in back porch overlooking Mollycross Pond. It was great to have Claude back in town and as chief no less, something Armand was proud to have had a hand in. Armand was privy to some things Annie had told him on the phone when Claude was a state cop. If Armand called his friend about going fishing and Claude wasn’t home, Annie, had, on a couple of occasions, unburdened herself, talking a blue streak while Armand patiently listened, a skill he’d perfected in his years behind the bar. With bar patrons, Armand mastered the art of appearing to listen to people’s long sob stories without actually hearing much. He felt a little ashamed when they’d thank him for listening, as if he were a priest who’d just granted absolution for sins. But with Annie, Armand was riveted to every word. He remained speechless the time she told him about Claude sinking into whiskey stupors on a regular basis during a rash of crashes on the pike. Armand got scared when she told him about Claude punching a hole in the living room wall. “Do you want me to talk to him?” he’d asked her. “No, I’ll handle it. He’ll be all right. He always comes back. Thanks for listening.” Armand, like his best friend, saw the Melanville chief’s job as a departure from whatever crucified Claude during his state police career. ### “Chief, Armand Benoit is here to see you,” Dottie Marcuse said through the intercom speaker of his desk phone. It took everything Claude had to push the speak button. “Let him in,” he replied. Dottie’s eyes followed Armand past the bulletproof glass as she buzzed him in to the hall that led to the chief’s office. With both Armand and the chief out of sight, she grabbed a Kleenex and dabbed her eyes. While he heard Armand making his way down the hall, Claude stood up and came from behind his desk. He moved a chair closer to his desk trying to prepare for the meeting. Should he ask Armand to sit down? Should he stand while Armand sat? Claude was still wrestling with the etiquette for telling his best friend that his son was dead when Armand walked in. “Howdy chief,” his friend said with emphasis, smiling, his eyes lighting up. “They stocked Stump Pond this week, so I assume it’s fishing and not cribbage tomorrow?” Claude had no answer, only a lame smile. “Are you OK?” Armand asked. “Let’s take a walk,” Claude said, amazed at how casual his voice sounded, ashamed of his cowardice, still not sure how he could tell Armand what happened. Claude led his friend through the garage and out into the floodlit back parking lot. Armand thought he might have a nice surprise, maybe a new boat. Claude walked his friend halfway across the parking lot, realized he’d walk right off the planet if he could, and finally turned to face him. “What’s up?” Armand asked. “There’s been an accident,” answered Claude as if he were reciting something out of a textbook, his voice flat and emotionless, a keep-them-at-arms-length voice a veteran detective had taught Claude and his fellow policy academy cadets, a protocol Claude was using for the first time. Armand resisted connecting the dots: red Camaro, Quicksand Pond Road, his best friend’s undertaker demeanor. “Yeah, Quicksand Pond Road,” said Armand, slowly, as if steeling himself for the worst. “I caught it on the scanner.” Claude put his hand to his mouth, inhaled and looked down, then looked up at his best friend and couldn’t speak. The deep breath brought up a hacking smoker’s cough he’d developed from twenty years of Lucky Strikes even though he’d quit two years ago. He had to turn his head. With the cough still exploding in Claude’s ears, Armand took over: “It was Ray,” said Armand, half questioning, half stating fact, asking for confirmation. Claude faced him again, feeling gutless, only nodding, caught in an excruciating game of charades with his best friend, the father of a dead son. Armand saved Claude from the heavy lifting: “He’s dead isn’t he?” Claude nodded and dropped his head and began to sob, his shoulders convulsing like he was purging himself of twenty-five years of pent up grief. “Jesus Christ, Claude!” Armand moved toward him as if on the attack. Claude instinctively stepped back and raised his arms. “Jesus Christ!” Armand fought past Claude’s outstretched arms and grabbed Claude by the shirt. “Jesus, Jesus,” Armand shook his friend with the rage of a jailed lunatic gripping cell bars. He pounded his head on Claude’s chest, Claude’s badge scratching his forehead enough to draw blood. Armand dropped to his knees. He grabbed Claude around the legs, sobbing, heaving as if he were a little boy desperate for his father to pull him into his arms. ### Annie ate her fish and chips and put Claude’s in the oven at a low temperature. She started knitting. After a while, she turned the oven off and took the fish and chips out so they wouldn’t dry out. By eleven, she covered them and put them in the fridge. She kept knitting, waiting for him to call. She decided when he got the chief’s job, she would never call the station. She knew it wouldn’t help if she did when there was something serious going on. Better to wait. Let Claude deal with things in his own good time. When Claude got home, the first thing she noticed was the blood stain on his shirt, just below his badge. She didn’t ask about it. She didn’t want him to bring the job home. She’d let him tell the story when he was ready. She wondered if she would be able to get the stain out of his brand new shirt.